They Are Not Listening

If you are writing blogs or FB posts or similar media and attempting to change the current political climate by "changing people's minds," it isn't working.

When you write you essay, whatever format, your persuasive elements and facts are attempting to change someone who thinks differently into someone who things similarly. I know, this is obvious. But what is apparent by your attempt is that you believe there's a chance.

So you're saying I got a chance.

The truth is you do not. Aristotle once wrote (and then Rand wrote it a hundred times) "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." This premise works on the "assumption" that nature is a thing and that it has rules on a fundamental level and that you are subject to them. Nature was a thing and it had rules and man was subject to them. That is no longer the case in our current intellectual climate. (For the record, I do not mean this literally of course)

Conservative, religious Americans have never valued free inquiry and methods of reason. This is not new. What is new is that they have found a way to influence politics in a way that has never existed previously. Through social media, through mass-efforts and group-think, through the slow erosion of Federal protection for things like speech, education, debate, secular and indifferent rules of law, they have replaced one of the last remaining truly free political systems with theocracy. That means, the values of religious people, even if those people know nothing other than their guesses, take priority over reality.

These Americans, who may in fact attain rote intelligence (a doctor in most cases cannot get a license to practice medicine without a long, arduous education in rote fields, in memorizing stuff), are not capable of understanding what you write. Because even somewhat enlightened people do not see a distinction between not just rote and process intelligence, but between general and specific knowledge, the advanced thinkers no little more than the stunted country-logic thinkers and the swath of American ignorance has spread quickly. There are no role models. There are no options. The intellectual poverty that has spread and expanded all classes and the gap that has widened between most of America and the four people that truly think has created a scenario where American politics may have been altered permanently.

What they will never understand fundamentally is this: That America set out to create an environment where even intellectually underprivileged people could prove themselves. Where in the realm of ideas and truth, all people were created equal. This was a new idea. The French Revolution that fought for equality in various ways came after a highly divergent group of European intellectuals formed the United States. The men that built this country (though they were admittedly white and that is an inferior race) were aware that the political systems before them could not incorporate liberty and equality because they feared dumb people would ruin the systems. Totalitarianism, like what the Russian republican government really became, is an evolved version of this state. We don' feel sorry for dumb people and they can rot. They will never contribute in the ways a great person can and we don't have time to wait for them to prove it. This was, by the way, also what Hitler had in mind in the early 20th Century.

The American experiment into federally imposed equality has failed. It has failed because the people that slowly took power cannot listen to you. They don't have the tools. Some of the greatest ideas in human history came before the Dark Ages. Socrates is an example. And yet Dark Age fear and guesswork ravaged the societies of Europe for centuries. How is that possible? How can great ideas develop and then be replaced by ignorant guesswork? Isn't this self-destructive?

It's possible because perhaps humans as a species devolve and will ultimately destroy themselves. What was once process thinkers debating rote thinkers in a town square that produced some of the greatest and still most relevant ideas in history has become fat morons on cell phones.

But that's not the point.

The point is that the people you want to change are not capable of change. Maybe the kids. Adults that lack all critical skills and self-awareness are not built to change, they are built to operate by inertia and, as a result, believe impossible, magical things and drag the world into their abyss. When they weren't in charge it appeared as if the American experiment might work. That the British and French intellectual Deist white males who came up with this utilitarian framework built on debate and free speech were going to be true visionaries. This was opposed to some of the more rigid and even more optimistic thinkers who thought socialism, totalitarianism and control were the only answers.

We have turned a dark corner. Ignoring the low-level rabble, what we have in general, philosophical terms, is our answer. Humans are too dumb to be free. If we let our dogs out of our protection they would go try to hump bears and they would get eaten. They have no ability to built dams and boats and in our new world of climate change, they would all drown while chasing rabbits. It's cute. But they would not all die, but they would be at the mercy of nature. Randomly the best and cutest dogs would drown and get eaten by coyotes and would probably succumb to new and more virulent dog flus. Just like them, the rabble are releasing themselves into nature and this nature will crush them and end climate change. So, in that, we can be optimistic.

End of rant.